Leagues
Some of you may be wondering, “Ian, what happened to your clockwork-regular posting at the end of 2023?” Well, two things:
- My laptop keyboard had to be replaced and then it was the holidays and so I fell out of the habit.
- Leagues.
I’m going to talk about the second one here.
100 levels in Trailblazer Reloaded.
What are Leagues?
In Old School RuneScape, leagues are a time-limited game mode with the following qualities:
- idiosyncratic or achievement-based advancement.
- accelerated standard advancement.
- unlockable game-breaking and unusual powers.
- broad limitations that can be gradually lifted.
- vague metaplot.
Time-limited
A league is a party, lasting only a month or two. Old players return, new players sign up, current players re-dedicate to the grind. When it ends, someone always remarks “I wish leagues went forever,” but these miss the point: then the game would be leagues, and leagues wouldn’t be special.
Advancement
Standard advancement in a league is accelerated, most obviously by an experience multiplier, and frequently by automatic content unlocks.
But advancement within a league itself is a secondary game structure overlaid on the first, built from a variably complex set of achievements. These can be anything from “help the cook bake a cake” to “navigate this interface tutorial” to “slay a dragon” to “chop down a tree growing in a potato field.” The variety and breadth of these tasks keep players seeking out novel content and interacting with the game in different ways.
Power
In leagues, you can do things that are impossible in the main game. Not only because of the accelerated advancement, but because of game-changing abilities that you can earn. Never get tired! Always hit your targets! Cook your fish as you catch them!
To my mind, these abilities come in three flavors: superpowers, rule-breakers, and accelerators. Superpowers let you do new things that you couldn’t before. Rule-breakers let you suspend some normal part of the game. And accelerators let you do the things you already could, but much faster and more conveniently.
Limitations
Leagues also come with limitations.1 Most commonly, these restrictions are geographic: as you advance in the league you unlock access to more areas, and with them the associated achievements and content. (And with more achievements available you can advance further in the league and unlock more areas and so on.) These restrictions need not detract from play, but can instead provide new challenges. Sometimes this means that a should-be trivial task becomes impossible, but sometimes it pushes you to explore novel or unusual methods of accomplishing it.
Metaplot
The metaplot of leagues is loose, to say the least. There’s a mysterious sage? And they lost their relics? But really, don’t worry about it. The bottom line is that nothing you do in leagues has a substantial effect on your main account.2 Think of it like a dream sequence.
100 levels in Trailblazer Reloaded.
The Joy of Leagues
Taken together, these ingredients provide:
- a fresh start, free of continuity.
- reevaluation of familiar content.
- the ability to “look ahead” to future content.
- low cost of risk.
Fresh Start
In leagues, you get to start again from the beginning. Maybe you wanted to try a different build. Maybe you want to ally with a different faction. Maybe you just need to shake a rut you’ve been in. Leagues is great for all of this!
Familiarity
I made my first RuneScape account in the year [REDACTED]. It’s been a long time since I did these early quests, and when I last did, I’m sure I had no idea what I was doing. But now, I remember the storylines, I optimize my travel time, I see betrayals coming, I know where the safe spots are, I know that Morgan keeps garlic in his upstairs cupboard and that the demon Delrith is kind of a pushover, and so on. In short, leagues is an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of all kinds and be rewarded for it.
It’s also just nice to see old faces again.
Previews
Conversely, I can explore storylines and areas I don’t yet know anything about. Because of the power available, a leagues character can quickly outpace their associated main account, giving players the opportunity to build comfort with patterns of high-level play and test the limits of the game.
Low Cost
RuneScape is already pretty generous around risk: even if you die, the worst case is that you lose what you’re carrying. In leagues, that risk is even less, as you can quickly replace the rarest of items. If you have to spend all your wealth doing so, then why not? It all goes away at the end of the season.
100 levels in Trailblazer Reloaded.
Leagues at the Tabletop
We could take all of this and try to create a “leagues experience” at the tabletop. This might be a fun change-of-pace for a long-running campaign, if potentially exhausting.
How
I suspect that an alternate game mode like leagues would require an existing game that meets regularly (in order to feel like an “alternative”) and frequently (in order to meet the compressed timeline). Characters probably want to be mid-level, in order to have both early adventures to revisit and future adventures to preview. And the base system wants a certain amount of “heft” to allow the grafting-on of the leagues subsystems: granular advancement that can be accelerated, rules that can be broken, technical difficulty to gate achievements behind.3 Or perhaps some of these subsystems could be abridged or excluded: I’m not sure that they’re all necessary, and it certainly would lighten the load of bookkeeping.
I had considered working an example, but I think any useful application of these ideas would require me to be in a game that even remotely matches this description. Until then, I’m content to leave this an outline.
However, Discord user Nailuj Raalestehcs on the RuneScape DnD server runs a league for three groups of players in their world of Korthia in between campaign arcs. The system is 5e D&D over Foundry VTT. This seems to meet most of these requirements. They note:
I’ve concluded that this is D&D for those that really like combat, loot and raid bosses. We’ve experienced little to no role play, if only for the beginning of certain quests.
100 levels in Trailblazer Reloaded.
Illustrations
The illustrations are simple collages of level-up messages from leagues (100 each). I wanted to communicate a little of the frenetic pace of advancement. The Trailblazer Reloaded league was 57 days from November 2023 to January 2024, and I reached a total level of 1979.
100 levels in Trailblazer Reloaded.
This is where the official marketing of leagues consistently breaks down: Jagex wants to tell you about the restrictions before they tell you about the cool stuff, which can leave the uninitiated scratching their heads.↩︎
Except for the cosmetic items and trophies you can claim at the end, some of which you can then sell to other players if you like.↩︎
Consider the “rule-breaker” abilities. In a crunchy game like 5e, “skip roll-to-hit” is a fun, strong, interesting power. In a rules-light game like Into the Odd, roll-to-hit has already been eliminated, there is no rule left to break.↩︎